Taking FLYTE: How You Helped These High School Students Go to Mexico

I get countless emails from people about how they have just taken their first trip and how their whole life has been flipped upside-down as a result. Travel connects you to people and communities that you never thought you would get to know, and to a you that you never knew you were.

Unfortunately, not everyone is lucky enough to travel — especially young students. Not everyone has parents to take them on RTW adventures, send them to study abroad, or even take them on a road trip over the weekend. Lots of schools in America don’t have the resources to maintain their art and gym classes, let alone send students on trips outside their community.

I couldn’t be more excited to announce that FLYTE is partnering with BEST Academy High School and Atlanta Public Schools to send the first FLYTE crew of students to study in Mexico this month!!!!!

In our initial fundraising round, we raised over $15,000 in donations from you! I am truly honored that so many of you wanted to contribute to this mission and I am also deeply grateful and humbled that when this charity was just a dream, you trusted in me to make it a reality.

And today it is a reality!

Thanks to all of your donations, in two weeks’ time, the BEST Academy High School students will be in Merida, Mexico to take Spanish courses, live with host families, volunteer, and learn more about the community, culture, and history of Mexico! Thanks to the partnership with FLYTE, this year The Boys Go Global Program will be bigger than any trip before. Twenty people (15 students and 5 educators) will be learning and volunteering in Mexico!

BEST Academy High School is an all-male public school in the Bankhead area of Atlanta. BEST Academy operates with limited resources and has a high population of students qualifying for reduced-priced meals. For these students, the chance to take an international trip may not have even crossed their minds.

For the past five years, Spanish teacher Erica Pereira has been tirelessly committed to making international travel a reality for them. She has worked with students, the school, and the community to raise funds to take a few students on trips to Panama, Guatemala, and Costa Rica.

When Erica first starting teaching Spanish classes at BEST Academy, she realized that many of her students hadn’t been on a plane before, or even left the state of Georgia! Knowing firsthand the power of travel, Erica knew she had to pass it along. She started The BEST Boys Go Global Program to start fundraising for travel (and international volunteering) experiences for her high school students.

“These experiences abroad are life-changing for the students who participate; and even for their classmates, friends, and families who cheer them on and support them from home. There is definitely a domino effect of positivity that radiates through this community with each student that we are able to introduce to the world,” says Ms. Pereira.

And now here students are getting a chance to do something they wouldn’t have otherwise. Here are the students in their own words:

None of this would have been possible if not for all of you who donated to FLYTE in our initial fundraising drive!

I’m so grateful to all of you for supporting this project and believing in our mission. We heard from so many enthusiastic readers who not only offered to donate monetarily, but who also wanted to donate their time and skills. (Currently, we are creating a group for dedicated volunteers, and I will let you know more information about how to get involved soon).

Exciting news #2: We have already started working on our next trip! We received countless applications from schools throughout the country applying to take their students on a summer trip abroad. After much consideration, we selected an incredible school located in Washington DC. I’ll have more information on that school when it’s official!

Your donations have already funded one school trip. Now, we’re raising $32,000 for our next school!

100% of your donations right now go to the school programs. Currently, I personally pay for all administrative costs out of my own pocket. Every dollar we raise goes directly towards the costs for the school’s travel expenses.

For just $10, you can help us fund our next program!

Think about that — for less than the cost of a night in a hostel, you can help make a difference in a young person’s life. You can help teach someone the power of travel and give him or her the opportunity to see a world they might never have been able to. Let’s pass the power of travel on to others!

Even better, your donation will get you access to updates about the student expeditions, their progress, and our foundation events, as well as messages from the teachers and students about their travels. Supporters will have exclusive access to the latest details on how they are helping change the lives of the next generation.

Exciting news #3: Since our 501(c)3 status is in the works, IRS rules say that while our application is pending, all donations are 50% tax-deductible. That means if you donate $5,000, $2,500 is tax deductible!

*****

Travel is a privilege. You’re reading this because you, like me, have caught the travel bug. We’ve gotten so much from travel in our own lives. Now, FLYTE gives us an opportunity to pay-it-forward and help students see how beautiful other countries and cultures are. Opportunities like this make a huge impact. The more funding we have, the more schools we can send abroad.

Let’s be a community that makes a difference and helps others.

I will close this out by not only offering my sincere gratitude for your help with this, but by also passing along Ms. Erica’s:

‘Thank you’ is not nearly enough to express my gratitude, but it is my hope that you fully understand how grateful I am for your generosity and for helping me change the lives of so many great young men.

For more information about FLYTE, ways to donate, get involved, or questions about our structure, visit the FLYTE website.

Congratulations Matt and to the students. I hope they have an awesome time and learn so much. Traveling is definitely and sometimes sadly a privilege that we don’t all get to experience. I am glad they will get to go. My trip to Europe when I was 18 gave me the travel bug. I just wish I was able to do more.

After we lost our original school, the next school on the list was BEST. They met all the need criteria and could go in our time frame. They were simply the best candidate school we had for a spring program. Our next school is a public school and is more gender balanced.

Loved reading this. I had the chance to do a study abroad for a year in Mexico and it was beyond life changing. It’s always good to give back! Hopefully these people and more students can experience that beautiful country.

This is such a wonderful initiative. Hats off to you for organising this and I hope the boys have an awesome, fulfilling time out in Mexico. Here’s to every success in the next trip you’re organising too 🙂

Just want to also say that, as someone organising something in a kind of similar vein (for a girls’ school), this is inspirational stuff. Thanks for sharing!

Great to hear you visited my home city of Perth!
Is very underrated compared to the East Coast of Aus and glad you visited the Wild West!
Hope you enjoyed your time!

Wow what a fantastic program. I remember my school trip to Turkey and then a school ski trip to Queenstown New Zealand were some of the great moments of my life and have encouraged me to head off on a working holiday to the UK which I head off to next week.

It is a wonderful program you have set up and I really think it will be very beneficial.

FLYTE is such a great idea. These young men seem really motivated, and I hope they can share their experience with their classmates and buddies. I teach English in China, and traveling abroad is a dream for a lot of my college students. In fact, even taking a trip to Beijing can be a dream for some from the countryside. Now I need to figure out how I can do something like FLYTE here in China.

Hi Matt,
So happy to see this program literally take flight. I had this same/similar idea when I was 20 (after studying abroad at 19) to have underserved youth travel, be exposed to other cultures and ways of life and possibly have their very first plane ride! It’s been 12 years and can’t say I’ve done anything with the idea but very happy to see you have taken on this amazing project! Congrats!

Greetings Matt & Nomadicmatt Subscribers :: I have recently retired from a career that afforded me the opportunity to live and work in five foreign countries. In the process, I have vacationed in probably fifteen more. It all started after high school with an enlistment in the Air Force which assigned me to Germany and Turkey for a year and a half each. My life has been forever enhanced since that first solo train trip from Frankfurt to Strasbourg. I was raised in a very small town in central Pennsylvania. You know, \”the fly-over zone\” between Philadelphia and Pittsburgh! The idea of foreign travel was never even on the list of possibilities. Exposure to foreign cultures gave me a DRAMATICALLY NEW perspective on life! In fact, that exposure led me to major in International Relations at Penn State and to study for a semester abroad in Paris. So Matt, my donation is on the way. Please extend my best wishes to the students anticipating travel to Cuba and that their horizons will be expanded.